The 5 Digg Tools You Needed

I know. There are (were) more digg.com tools out there than you can shake a virtual shovel at. I’ve tried many. These are the tools I find myself going back to and using over and over again to build and prune my friends list and track stats.

These digg tools:

will help you become an influential Digg user

won’t risk getting you banned

1. BiggBoard by Brainnovate

biggboard.brainnovate.com is a “real-time dashboard for Digg.com”

BiggBoard lets you type in a Digg username to see how well your story submission is performing during the 24 hour period it has a chance to make the Digg front page.

Enter your username from Digg in the box at the top, and then select a story you would like to track from your upcoming list. There is no need to refresh the page, everything happens automatically and you can track your stories as they move from left to right and hopefully to the front page.

Digg has de-emphasized its category structure so that it is not always apparent what category or subcatory the user is looking at (ew, those yucky old web 1.0 pointers). Brainnovate lets you see how fast your submission is moving up the categories to the top compared with other stories. Use this tool to determine the best categories to submit to. For example, you may want to submit your story to “Microsoft” instead of the potentially more competitve “Software” or “Industry News categories.”

2. Friend Statistics

Do you expect your Digg friends to digg at least some of your stories? Do you have Digg friends who go AWOL? Friend Statistics let’s you keep tabs on how many of your submissions your friends are actually digging. Not reciprocating enough for your taste? Drop them. Or at least don’t digg their silly lolcats stories anymore!

Enter your Digg user name and this script will tell you which of your friends are digging your submissions – and which aren’t. FriendStatistics.com will analyze your Digg friends list and tell you which of your friends have dugg the last 10 of your digg submissions, and which of your friends have not. It will also tell you which users in the digg community other than your friends have dugg more than five of your submissions.

3. Neaveru

Are you the kind of digger who wins the hearts of your friends with witty comments and ascii art? Do you love making your political enemies mad until they bury your comments into oblivion? A lot of diggers use comments to charm other diggers into friendship. Neaveru let’s you see statistics on the last 10000 comments that you’ve made along with the actual comment itself. You can use this to see how popular your comments are with other diggers, even if they are not your friends.

4. Social Blade

Want to buddy up with Digg power users and win their friendship? First, you need to know who they are. Social Blade let’s you see who the real Digg powerusers are and were. Track where you appear on the top lists of users as you begin your journey to the top.

Input your Digg id into Social Blade and see a snapshot of all your digg story stats or the stats of others graphed out, active and non-active. I usually go straight to the top 1000 active user list to see if I’ve risen or fallen and who is above. Feeling nostalgic for your old friends who were banned from Digg? Enhance your reminiscing with the Digg Graveyard. There’s a lot more nifty stuff at Social Blade to check out.

5. di66.net

Like Social Blade, di66.net gives you top user data too but also gives up some other very interesting data that can help you determine how to craft your titles and descriptions.

Top Words in Titles

Top Words in Descriptions

Digg’s Top Sources

Most Popular Digg’s Topics

You can see all the top domains sources that any user is submitting. Pretty cool.

This tool has implications for my SEO brethren out there. Just look at this screen cap of the top Digg words in titles. Once you get past all the stop words and superlatives, you see what subjects users are voting to the top. You can choose stories within those topics in the hope that they will be received well by diggers.

Now where is that really cool Digg tool that does everything I want in one click? Twitter? Ah, that’s another post.

I'm editor and keeper of the flame at Clickfire, fanatical social media blogger and builder of Internet things from way back. My love for social media and success with organic search led me to start my own consulting company. Apart from the Internet, I could be considered pretty worthless. More...

Holy schamoly – wish I had this list when I was active: these are great tools, and I’ve only played with one or two of them. I don’t think people realize how hard it is to be active on Digg and blog; for me, it’s near impossible.